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The burgeoning use and transformative impact of global electronic networks are widely recognized to be defining features of contemporary world affairs. Less often noted has been the increasing importance of global governance arrangements in managing the many issues raised in such networks. This book helps fill the gap by assessing some of the key international institutions pertaining to global telecommunications regulation and standardization, radio frequency spectrum, satellite systems, trade in services, electronic commerce, intellectual property, traditional mass media and Internet content, Internet names and numbers, cybercrime, privacy protection, and development. Eschewing technocratic approaches, the chapter offer empirically rich studies of the international power dynamics shaping these institutions. They devote particular attention to the roles and concerns of non-dominant stakeholders, such as developing countries and civil society, and find that global governance often reinforces wider power disparities between and within nation-states. But at the same time, the chapter note, governance arrangements often provide nondominant stakeholders with the policy space needed to advance their interests more effectively. Each chapter concludes with a set of policy recommendations for the promotion of an open, dynamic, and more equitable networld order.

Focusing on early social media in the arts and humanities and on the core role of creative computer scientists, artists, and scholars in shaping the pre-Web social media landscape, Social Media Archeology and Poetics documents social media lineage, beginning in the 1970s with collaborative ARPANET research, Community Memory, PLATO, Minitel, and ARTEX and continuing into the 1980s and beyond with the Electronic Café, Art Com Electronic Network, Arts Wire, The THING, and many more. With first person accounts from pioneers in the field, as well as papers by artists, scholars, and curators, Social Media Archeology and Poetics documents how these platforms were vital components of early social networking and important in the development of new media and electronic literature. It describes platforms that allowed artists and musicians to share and publish their work, community networking diversity, and the creation of footholds for the arts and humanities online. It invites comparisons of social media in the past and present, asking: What can we learn from early social media that will inspire us to envision a greater cultural presence on contemporary social media? Contributors: Madeline Gonzalez Allen, James Blustein, Hank Bull, AnnickBureaud, J. R. Carpenter, Paul E. Ceruzzi, Anna Couey, Amanda McDonald Crowley, Steve Dietz, Judith Donath, Steven Durland, Lee Felsenstein, Susanne Gerber, Ann-Barbara Graff, Dene Grigar, Stacy Horn, Antoinette LaFarge, Deena Larsen, Gary O. Larson, Alan Liu, Geert Lovink, Richard Lowenberg, Judy Malloy, Scott McPhee, Julianne Nyhan, Howard Rheingold, Randy Ross, Wolfgang Staehle, Fred Truck, Rob Wittig, David R. Woolley

This book is a study of the telegraph in western North America, concentrating on the latter half of the nineteenth century. A number of distinguished books and articles have been written about the telegraph and the nineteenth-century American experience. For the most part, however, this scholarly work is geographically partial. The standard histories of the American telegraph are stories of the East Coast and the Atlantic Seaboard, the growing Midwest, and service to urban areas. This book looks toward the West. The narrative includes landscapes and ecosystems, meteorology, surveillance, and containment and conflict with Native Americans. Major themes include the high ground, the signal flow, the state secret, and the secure command. Opening with discussion of the first attempts to bring the telegraph to the Trans-Mississippi West, the book concludes with the consolidation of the secure command of electronic communication networks in the White House during the Spanish-American War, detailing the transformation of electronic communication networks from continentalism to globalism. The terrain of the narrative incudes the Great Plains, the Southwest, the Pacific Coast, the Rocky Mountains, the border with Mexico, and the subarctic and arctic areas of North America. This book presents an interpretive approach that centers on environmental, climatological, military, and surveillance issues as key factors in the history of electronic communication networks.